Now we come back with an analysis on who is reviewing, and to which companies reviewers are affiliated. To provide some context, it is worth citing the commit and review policy of the WebKit project, which explains how only specific developers, with long and recognized experience in the project, can become reviewers: “A potential Reviewer may be nominated once they have submitted a minimum of 80 good patches. They should also be in touch with other reviewers and aware of who are the experts in various areas.” Since changes to source code have to be accepted by a reviewer, to some extent they are acting as the gatekeepers of the project, those in charge of ensuring that new code matches quality standards, and are in line with the project guidelines.

Therefore, the analysis of which companies are employing reviewers shows the project from another perspective, this time focused on those involved in this gatekeeping activity. The landscape now is different from that shown by the authorship analysis.

Some interesting results are the share of contributions by the two main companies behind the project (Apple and Google), and how it has evolved from a project clearly driven by Apple, before 2009, to the current situation, with Google leading the top contributors table, and both Apple and Google being almost equal in contribution share over the whole history of the project. During the last years, it is also noteworthy how the diversity of the project is increasing, with new players starting to show a significant activity.

WebKit is a well known free, open source software project which is producing the core of several of the most popular web browsers. Several companies (and other actors) are collaborating together to build this component, which is key to many of them. The two main players in WebKit are Apple and Google, but it is less known that there are many others participating actively as well. They are far away from the big players, but all together account for a sizable fraction of the total activity.

This post is the first of a series on different aspects of WebKit development, based on the analytics we at Bitergia are gathering about it. Our take is that WebKit is one of those projects massively used by the industry, and therefore worth studying with the aim of providing quantitative and objective data about it.

Figure 1: Total activity in WebKit for the six most active companies (commits)

Bitergia, the software development analytics company

Bitergia is focused on software development analytics. We aim to produce useful information about how software projects are performing, how different actors are contributing and how they could be improved.

We provide tools and means to track all these aspects, and to evaluate how policies and decisions are shaping the development processes.